


Grow A Thicket Of Brambles

by slamjam



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Everybody Lives, Except the director cus fuck him, F/M, Fix-It, maybe more characters in later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-08-10 02:46:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7827370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slamjam/pseuds/slamjam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>El has a weird relationship with her hair (sometimes having the strength to let something grow is greater than the strength needed to cut it off)<br/>(I tried to write one thing and it got completely out of hand whoops!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Before

When she was very young, there was more. Eleven remembers a room with a rocking chair with thick swirling cushions, there were toys there too, a truck, some dolls, balls and other shapes that you could build into towers, a big inflatable…something that was good for batting at. They would leave her there for long times, but she was fine, always has been good at entertaining herself. The best part was when someone would come in to play with her at the end of the day. They would come into the room all swish-swish of his suit-legs and Eleven would spin around sofast and launch herself into their arms, and they’d say “hello Eleven” and she’d say “hello papa” and smile her biggest smile. 

He was the only one who’d read to her, she read over his shoulder, could have eaten those books up like candy but never said a thing about it lest papa stop bringing them. It was easier to stay quiet the girl she could see in her head sometimes told her. Then you never get hurt. The girl said a lot of things Eleven couldn’t understand. Used words like bird and car and asshole. She really liked the last one best. She said she was named Kim, but her mama called her Kimmy, but everyone called her Nine because she was the ninth girl to be in here.  
“Where is here?” Eleven would ask and Kimmy would point to the nothingness around them and say “Right where you are! Right in this building!” and Eleven would look around her and see no one and say “No?” and it would go on like this until Kimmy started crying again or Eleven got lightheaded and had to lie down for a little bit.  
She told papa about her one day by accident. They were reading Little Red Riding Hood and she asked whether the little girl could hear the wolf talk to her in her head, since he said wolves couldn’t really talk in real life. He said no and where did you get that idea from Eleven and all the truth came spilling out. She didn’t hear Kimmy that night, and the next day papa came in with a story she had never heard before. Rapunzel didn’t get eaten by wolves or bears with porridge. She left her tower but got lost out forever in the wilds with her prince unable to find her, and Eleven thought it was just the saddest story in the whole world and started to cry, until Papa lifted her chin from her chest and said “do you know what the moral of the story is Eleven girl”  
“No” she snuffled.  
“Don’t disobey those who take care of you. They know what’s best, and if you let someone else tell you what to do then you might end up as hurt as Rapunzel, out in the wild.”  
She snuffled closer to Papa’s chest, rubbing her face into the starchy synthetic material of his shirt.  
“Don’t wanna get hurt Papa”  
“It’s alright Eleven, I won’t let anything hurt you. But don’t try and communicate with anyone in your head unless I tell you.”  
She nodded, curled up small in his arms and he rocked her slowly to sleep. 

Soon after that, they stopped putting her in that room all day and started her Training and it was all dark rooms and EEG monitors and lonely lonely. She remembered what Kimmy had said and didn’t talk much, made sure she was enough for herself, created tiny worlds to live in like the Little Prince, but sometimes the emptiness got so great and yawning that she broke and cried. She wanted and wanted for something she didn’t know but needed like breathing, and rocked herself to sleep after the tears had stopped. 

Then: The Upside Down.  
Then: she needed to leave so she bent time and space and drainage pipes to do so.  
Then: Mike.  
He was the first person since Papa to touch her kindly, and the first person besides Papa in a long while to do so without gloves, and he was the first person she could remember who was so….soft?  
He was kind to her, tried to show her cool things like the recliner chair and Yoda, and took the time to explain things the other boys were saying to her and didn’t turn out the lights on her when she said no. He listened to her. And when he laughed his eyes crinkled and his shoulders came up to his ears and she didn’t know why but she knew like breathing that she should trust him.  
She learned a lot those three days in the basement, but then she had to go to school and the boys rummaged up a dress and a wig that reminded her of-  
(blonde hair, the ash in the sky, the wet and the damp and the unbelievable nothing  
don’t trust anyone but us)  
(I won’t let anything hurt you  
Friends don’t lie)  
(was Papa her friend?)  
She put it on anyways. She didn’t know why, but the hair fell soft around her shoulders, and she looked up and saw her reflection, saw something soft and good. She could learn to like that.


	2. tha second 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Soundtrack for this chapter: ["Only Time" by Enya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfYIMyS_dI) played at 50% speed. Also I was not trying to rip off the lovely bones but i just realized hey, a chorus of dead kids all killed by the same hand(s) leading the final dead child through the afterlife, how lovely and also totally original!

Of course it all went to hell when she started to use her powers, she knew the bad men were going to come but they needed to find Will so she tried.  
It was only a matter of time.   
She started to lose control because she was remembering more and more every day (the bath and how the monster’s growls echoed in her head like it was an empty room, how no one had thought to take her out of the Bath for so long she had to rip it apart to be able to breathe again). She tried to hide but those boys were in too deep for them to be safe, and she’d felt Mike’s fear across town like he was standing right next to her and ran to him because there was no other thing she could imagine doing. And even after he was on solid ground she couldn’t make her legs move, couldn’t pull away. Monster, monster, thrummed her heart but Mike just held her tighter and told her that she wasn’t a monster, that she saved him.   
A chance at redemption, the possibility that she was something other than a weapon, that she might be something vaguely shaped like a human and through the haze of Power induced exhaustion and the blood she felt something spark to life inside her. Dustin collapsed into both of them, breath still hiccupping with shock and they all just sat there crying like little kids for a good long while.   
“You saved me” echoed in El’s head. Every time she used her powers, she clutched onto the memory of Mike’s hands on her shoulders like it was something she could touch, to remind her that she was Something Good, 

“You saved me.” She thought as she touched the demigorgon’s body.   
She saved him. She saved them all. 

But of course that couldn’t just be the end. Her heart wouldn’t stop going, even when she was nowhere and everywhere at once. Everything was all black water and she was floating. Like the place she went to when she listened real hard, but strangely calm and private. Cozy. She wiggled her fingers, and made little ripples in the water, lifted her arm and made a tiny splash and it made her laugh unexpectedly. It echoed through the nothingness, distorting and coming back to her impossibly like the laugh of a thousand different girls. She wondered where they were. “We’re right here!” they whispered from all around her. “We’re right here!” and she knew that this is where Kimmy had gone and rose to follow.   
“Wait!” they shouted and she faltered, “There is a choice. You can join us or make your own path.”  
What does that mean she wondered and they responded aloud “You are the last of us, and together here we are stronger than any of us could have hoped in the real world. We thought-“ and the voice split and fractured into a thousand again, like a bone off a cliffside. El was not nearly as scared as she should have been and she knew it.  
“You thought?”  
The voices trembled and swept up into one whispery stream again “We are powerful together, some of us wanted you to join us so we could become one real thing, but we have decided” they split again, widening and narrowing “-strong enough to send you back. But not to follow.”  
She bowed her head at the realization. They would give anything for her, and she suddenly thought of Joyce and how she cried for Will.   
“Sister” the voices whispered, they were getting quieter now.   
“Like Nancy?” She whispered back.  
“Yes.” She smiled. “Do you want to go home?”  
What is home anymore?  
“It’s whatever you want it to be.”  
She looked to her left and saw something white in the sky. Small as a star, but somewhere to go, and she suddenly knew that if she wanted, she could be there in an instant. She could be anything, forever.   
Maybe fear really was impossible here.  
She chose, yelled a “goodbye” and whispered a “thank you” to her shouting sisters, and for the first time began to sink. 

She woke up in a drainage pipe, half covered in leaves and banks of decayed earth that had swept up around her shins and curved to follow the bend of her knee. Just outside early spring crocuses were muscling their tiny purple heads up from the frozen earth, halving it, and she agreed with the sentiment wholeheartedly. There was a time at which she would get up from this place, and start the business of living her new life, but it was dark and she was newborn so she waited, looking up at her new world in the dark blue light, waiting until there was a tinge of gold in the clouds. The sunrise hit the sky in gold and red and El smiled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More 2 come! The next chapter: I actually explore the emotional implications of El finally fuckign growing out her hair like i set out to do originally aaaaAAAAAAHHHHHH.   
> also if any of you need a pick me up play [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jml41Sbj-Ac) at 50% speed because i almost cried laughgdnf n (warning REALLY LOUD so turn down ya volumes)  
> Y'all tell me if u wanna see anything/anyone else in the last chapter (or what i hope will be the last chapter b/c i keep pUTTING IT OFF)


	3. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eleven is lost and found, a tiny math genius, back with her boys, loved and loves, and is healing very very slowly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY FOR THE LONG ABSENCE BUT WE BACK AND I'M FINISHING THIS THING UP FINALLY.

She sweated her pain out like a long fever. For a while it was a real fever, feverishly shuddering out an invisible fever on the Beyer’s couch because she couldn’t go to the hospital eyes open blankly at the plain white ceiling for what felt like hours but turned out to be weeks. The chorus in her head crested like quiet waves, sussurous and low, blue noise where words were syrup and the sound of bubbling conversation let her know someone else was there, just down the stairs. Time stretched and then suddenly snapped back, elastic like it always does, and she could sit up and stagger to the bathroom, or the kitchen to sit and shiver at the table with a mug of lemon tea, chicken legs sticking out of Joyce’s deep winter duvet. There were lingering effects, there always are, her body would shake at times, jerk one way or the other like a ghost had tugged at her nerves, someone else’s fears trying to shake their way out of her skin. For months she needed about three sweaters to remain at a normal temperature. It was hard to control her body, a beast everyone but El had tried to touch and tame and conquer with no thought to the girl inside of it. The one who had to live with this unbroken thing, a monster inside her chest that reared its head, unladylike. At least now people were trying to help her. 

The boys weren’t allowed to see her until she got better, so she spent a good month lazing around the Byers house getting fatter and better and more used to the regular use of socks and pants. Things started to develop a regular pattern. Joyce and Hop, fought over sending her to a “shrink”, and while they were fighting El built card towers in the living room and bled out of her nose. Joyce taught her how to read a clock and tie her shoes. How to sing without hitching, and then how to speak, brought her advanced mathematics textbooks from the library because reading was for Papa, but math was hers when they weren’t using her for testing. She learned how to ask for food and water with her words, and how to say stop or too much in sign (there wasn’t much in the Hawkins public library, but Hopper brought a bag of hardcover books over with titles that run over two lines and a wry smile and that was that). 

She managed to force a full paragraph out the day before her quarantine is set to expire.  
When Mike saw her for the first time (Dustin’s hand on his back pushing him into the living room, crushing the stems of a tiny bouquet of flowers in his right hand “wildflowers, he must have picked them himself” she heard quietly and then her head was silent) because he was wrapping his arms around her, digging his cold nose into her neck right where it tickles and she squealed as Dustin was yelling something about how he “knew it the whole time, she was right here” in her left ear and Lucas was laughing next to him and this, all of this, was hers, hers, hers. 

Later there was lemonade and hamburgers (the only thing Hopper can cook), and a giant debrief. In her absence the boys had been incessantly researching alternate dimensions and as much theoretical physics as they could understand (“so you must have the ability to tap into energy fields and manipulate them, do you know how that exactly works?” “Dustin what are you even saying right now?”) 

Mike holding her hand on the couch, never stopped touching her like he couldn’t believe she’s real. She couldn’t believe it much either. 

So she grew, in the small space of safety that was so easily violated. She clung to it, made a home in it and tried to memorize every moment of tiny blissful happiness, waking up slowly on Saturdays, the taste of pilfered beer behind the house, the way Mike’s nose scrunched when he laughed and Lucas’s soft eyes when talking about something he loved, and all of it, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And then it didn’t. And then it had been half a year and Eleven had grown four inches and hair long enough to bother her when she was reading and Joyce started to ask her whether she wanted to choose a name other than Eleven (she liked Mary, but didn’t quite know if it fit her anymore)(1) and she heard her and Hop deliberating about getting her “papers” while making dinner side by side (she saw Joyce blushing when they brushed arms and heard Hop’s off key love songs in the shower when she stayed at the trailer, it wouldn’t be long before they got their act together). It was half a year and she felt so stupid for wanting so badly to stay.

She had spent so much of her life as a mistake, an object, sterile, and sometimes she would dream of the rooms she grew up in, waking up disoriented and crying bitter tears because that was wrong but God it felt so familiar. It was better to wake up with the others’ dreams, little siblings, pets, basements and weddings and fractured houses she had never spent her childhood in but could cross blind. Someday, she knew, she’d go after those placed. Find her sisters’ homes and walk those floors, trying to find a way to explain what had happened to her parent’s other daughters. Closure, her mind whispered, relieved, yearning, but she had growing to do here. She had years yet to learn safety in her bones, to settle. So for now she stretched her legs out as far as they’d go on the Beyer’s living room floor, wiggling her toes. Ruffled her hair. Last night she had dreamed it was long enough to get caught places when she sat or lay places, that her mother had braided it at night with soft hands, and with every link she had placed a prayer, and with every link she knew it was another year out of hell, and Joyce held her until she fell asleep. She smiled, she could live for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) The meaning of the name Mary is "from the sea of bitterness".  
> Alternate titles for this chapter:  
> Eleven Learns To Cope With Extreme Mental Trauma  
> I Rewrote This Chapter Like 49430 Times Because It Didn't Hit That Sweet Spot In M'soul And Eventually Gave Up  
> I Process My Experiences With Early Childhood Mental Illness Through Psychopomp Children: Greatest Hits 
> 
> P.S. I know i said stuff that might come off as dismissive about therapy and I just want to clarify I am 10000000% in support of it and am actually in therapy myself lmao. It just served the story.

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't resist putting a tiny reference to Albert Bandura's [Bobo Doll experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_doll_experiment) in El's nursery, even though they were done in the mid 60's and were distinctly Not evil experimentation on a poor telekinetic child. they are pretty cool though in terms of learning how humans....learn. I can't words good (and gee you take one high school psych class and you're plugging the stuff everywhere!).


End file.
